The coronation of “the accompanying comrade” Sică Alexandrescu – A case study

Abstract

Have “People’s Artists” been famous artists, plain “nomenklatura” representatives in the artistic milieu or just “accompanying comrades”? What were the characteristics of the mechanism producing these “people’s artists” in the first years after the concept had been imported from the USSR? What are, in this  context, the specificities of the Romanian theatre environment? Who are the people selected to become “distinguished artists”, “State Prize Laureate”,  Emeritus Masters of art” or “People’s artists” – and what justifies this hierarchy? Clearly, some of the members of the first generation of communist “theatre heroes” were truly artists who had earned a certain fame even before the Second World War. Others, however, had not – or they had earned an  entirely different kind of status and fame in the artistic milieu. We shall try to uncover at least a part of the mechanism for selecting/producing “state artists”, by means of a case study focusing on possibly the most illustrative character for the stated theme: theatre director Sică Alexandrescu. With this in view, we used previous files of personal research concerning the political, ideologic and aesthetic debates in the first decades of the communist regime, we  revisited archives, journal and cultural magazines collections and, of course, we revisited the articles and books written by the famous theatre director  himself.